BookBrowse Reviews Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

BookBrowse:

In this funny and moving debut novel, a disabled woman's unusual relationship with her male nurse changes the way she thinks of her body and sexuality.

Saou Ichikawa's debut novel, Hunchback, is acerbic and sexy and lightly provocative, partly because of the "twisted" thoughts of its narrator and partly for its depiction of the erotic relationship between a disabled woman and her able-bodied nurse, a relationship that resists easy categorizations and legible power dynamics. I thought it was genius.

The novel follows Shaka, a 44-year-old woman with a congenital muscle disorder that causes weak muscles and a curved spine. As such, her regular physical state is one of discomfort, which she details frankly: Her S-shaped spine is constantly constricting her heart and lungs and crushing her internal organs. When she reads, she has to switch positions every thirty minutes, because one position puts too much pressure on her neck and the other puts too much pressure on her lower back. "When I read a book my spine bends, crushing my lung, puncturing a hole in my throat; when I walk I bang my head—to live, my body breaks," she says. She is not self-pitying; when flashes of bitterness break through the narrative, they are directed at an ignorant, ableist society and people who rarely think of those like her (such as self-proclaimed book lovers who extol the feel and smell of physical books over e-readers, not considering that not everyone has the luxury of holding books and flipping pages). When she calls herself a "hunchbacked monster," it reads less like self-loathing than a deadpan invocation of how others must see her.

Shaka lives in a group home that her wealthy parents bought and then left to her when they passed away, along with a large sum of money she has no reason to spend; she rarely leaves her room and has no visitors, apart from the group home's staff and nurses. Among other people, Shaka doesn't say much, but in her room and online, she's a voracious reader and writer. She takes virtual classes and has a gig writing erotica stories and fake first-person articles about sex clubs. Her stories are hilariously and charmingly cliché (the men are rich financial traders; the women are E-cup students); to represent "women's sex sounds," she types out all the noises, because it "helps boost the word count": "MMM, mmm! Mn, mnn! Aaah!" ("meaningless sounds transliterated by a middle-aged, severely disabled virgin," she calls them).

She also tweets out provocative thoughts, like "In another life, I'd like to work as a high-class prostitute," and, "I'd like to know what it's like to have an abortion." Yes, she has sex on the brain, but it's more than that. She wants to be "a normal woman," to experience the "friction" that other people—those who live in society instead of outside of it, who have to work for their money and encounter other people in an unmediated real world—experience, to go through the life processes (sex, breakups, abortion, marriage, babies) that people with the correct genetic "blueprints" do. Movingly and tragically, she thinks of getting pregnant and having an abortion as a way of "becoming a person," but also as a fuck-you to the casual way that able-bodied couples abort disabled fetuses: "Wouldn't that finally even the scales?"

The plot ramps up—and questions of bodily autonomy come to a head—when Shaka's usual nurse calls off after a Covid exposure. Due to staff shortages, Shaka has no choice but to be bathed by a male nurse, Tanaka, a self-identified "beta male," possibly because of his height: just over five feet. ("I'm one of the disadvantaged ones, too," he tells her. "Oh my god," she thinks. "He's probably an incel. Fuck!") The bath is a somewhat sexual experience for her, although she knows it's not supposed to be. "Disabled people were not sexual beings—I had assented to the definition that society had created," she says. "To do so, I had fed myself a convenient lie."

But the dynamic between Shaka and Tanaka becomes increasingly charged. The way they speak to each other is not the usual sterile, "major key" way that most people in the group home speak to each other, "like some kind of undercover marketing material." He's forthright and contemptuous. He reveals that he's been reading her tweets and pointedly asks if she's found someone to get her pregnant yet. He knows she has money; the indecent proposal hardly needs to be uttered. While bathing her, she thinks, "he must have felt as though he were polishing a heap of gold coins."

Their next encounters don't follow a typical script, like the ones undergirding the erotica that Shaka writes, but they are erotic nonetheless—a swirling mix of resentment, shame, lust, and money. Hunchback is an illuminating, challenging exploration of the intersection between disability rights, reproductive rights, sex work, and class (see Beyond the Book). It also falls under one of my favorite types of narrative, which is someone realizing that they can no longer lie to themselves, no matter how ugly or difficult the truth may be; within this category, Shaka's is one of the more entertaining, and, indeed, inspiring, stories I've read, both for the absurd lengths she'll go to and the intelligence she possesses while getting there.

This review will run in the March 26, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.